Maintenance concept development: A case study

Abstract The cost of operations and maintenance can make or break a business, especially with today's increasing demand on productivity, availability, quality, safety and environment, and the decreasing profit margins. In maintenance, there are two basic interventions: Corrective Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance. According to the way these two basic interventions are applied, five basic maintenance policies can be distinguished: Failure Based Maintenance, Design-Out Maintenance, Use Based Maintenance, Condition Based Maintenance and Detection Based Maintenance. The final maintenance plan for a company's assets will be a combination of these alternatives, and often they could all be used on the same machine. However, in order to be able to make rational and justifiable tactical decisions concerning maintenance, one needs to have a clear idea of what the advantages and disadvantages of each maintenance policy are. In addition, a supporting maintenance concept is required. Developing and implementing a maintenance concept is a difficult process that may be suffering from many problems, like the lack of a systematic and consistent methodology, in other words the lack of a framework. In this paper, a case is presented of the successful implementation of a maintenance concept developed with the aid of a 7-step modular framework. It is the aim of this paper to provide some information on how to use this framework and to provide some guidelines which can be helpful when making the decision which maintenance policy to use.